Student Tags

Good news! We’ve updated our tagging system so that in addition to tagging your events, you can now add tags to your students and other users at your studio. Tags on users are super useful for the times you want to group students together without having to rely on the passes they’ve purchased or the events they’re attending.

Easily add tags to users for things like teacher trainings, retreats, skill levels or as another example to indicate when someone is a local when your studio is frequented by tourists. Super useful for our customers in Hawaii and Aruba! 😍

How it works

The pattern for adding tags to users follows exactly the pattern for adding tags to events. Simply tap/click the tags icon while on the user in question, and add an existing tag or create a new one. To remove a tag, click the tag icon and delete the tag.

Like event tags, all the tags you create are available to be seen on the “studio tags” page which you can access via your studio menu. Once you’ve added tags to people, you can easily look up your students by tags in our reports, and of course email them as a group.

Tags are quick and easy to use, super useful and can help you communicate with your students more easily. Check it out!

Other misc. updates.

In addition to our tags system we’ve updated the find-a-sub feature to include class title when requests go out, along with shipping a handful of small bug fixes.

As always, more to follow next month and in the meantime email us with any questions!

New Feature: Require login on payment forms

Another month, another set of updates! Like last month, we’ve spent some more times on our payment forms and Captcha, in particular giving our customers the option of requiring login to proceed with making a payment.

Generally speaking we recommend allowing anyone to make a payment, even if they’re not logged in. In fact, this capability is one of our founding principals: that people should be able to interact with your business without first having to sign up for an account.

There are however a handful of circumstances you might want to require people to log in. One area we’ve been focusing on lately is bot prevention, and as we mentioned last month we’ve added captcha to all our payment forms for logged out users. While it’s rare, bots can still at times get past Captcha prevention. In the unlikely event a bot successfully starts spamming your payment forms even with Captcha in place, now you have another line of defense and can put up a “log in wall”.

Additionally, our customers in the European Union are now subject to Secondary Customer Authentication requirements, and these secondary authentications usually expire in 1 hour. So if a logged out user makes a payment in Europe, there’s a good chance it’ll fail if it’s not matched within an hour. For these studios, depending on how quickly you’re able to match payments, it might make sense to require people sign in before making a payment as those are processed immediately.

In addition to the login options, we’ve also updated the language around your captcha selection options to indicate that you’re choosing between using v2 captcha and v3 captcha, made some nice updates to the website widgets page to more prominently display your mobile app site url, and shipped a number of other small bug fixes and system updates.

More updates to follow next month!

Latest System Updates!

We’ve released a number of small updates over the past few months that collectively deserve to be called out for our customers. Coming out of last year where we made a lot of large updates, we’ve been spending a bunch of time on a lot of “little” things the first few months of this year. We’re constantly releasing updates so you may have noticed some of these already but we hadn’t formally announced these yet - check out all the updates below.

Virtual & In-Person Registration Counts

We released our Hybrid Registration system last summer, but there were still a handful of places where we weren’t separately calling out the number of in-person vs. virtual registrations and attendances - namely on the “Today” page. That’s now updated!

Permissions Updates

We’ve updated the permissions so that users with the role of Instructor and above can update the broadcast url filed on events. Previously users had to be a Desk or Admin user to make this update, and this change should help some studios with their workflow around getting your Livestream events started.

Added Captcha to Payment Forms

On a few occasions we’ve had to deal with bots hitting customer payment forms. We’ve updated our payment forms to include invisible captcha to prevent bot spam, and for an extra layer of protection you can optionally turn on “checkbox captcha” on your payment form settings page, which will require users to solve a captcha image puzzle before proceeding with making a payment.

Bug Fixes and General Maintenance

In addition to the above we’ve also squashed a number of small bugs, and have also made some updates to the infrastructure which allows our customers to host our widgets on their own domain. A small handful of customers were seeing degraded performance with their widgets and we were able to track down and resolve the issue.

More to come soon!

We’re always working hard to improve the system, and we’ll have more updates to share soon!

New Feature: Waitlists!

We’re thrilled to announce a new feature we’ve been working on for a while - the ability for your students to join a wait-list for in-person attendances. Now, when when your in-person registrations are full, students will have the ability to join a wait-list, in addition to registering for virtual attendance. (when virtual is turned on of course.)

Fully Integrated

Fully integrated with our hybrid registrations system, students can now register for in-person or virtual attendance, join a wait-list when in-person is full, join the wait-list and register for virtual, and manage their registrations to switch from virtual to in-person when spots open up.

Depending on the exact situation of an event, and a student’s specific registration status, students can see a variety of different options.

Once a student adds themselves to the wait-list, they’ll receive a confirmation email that they’ve been added to the wait-list. If/when spots become available, students will receive a notice of spot availability, if spots are available, when the de-registration time threshold is reached.

Turning on waitlists

To enable wait-lists head on over to the “Registrations Settings” page in your studio menu, and scroll down to the “Deregistration and Waitlist Settings” section. (Note: The wait-list option can only be used when you also allow students to de-register from events)

IMPORTANT: The timing around when students on the wait-list receive the notification that spots are available is tied directly to the de-registration threshold:

• If students are allowed to de-register up until 12 hours before class starts, students on the wait-list will receive notice of space availability 12 hours before class starts, if in-person spots are available.

• Likewise, if students are allowed to de-register up until 3 hours before class starts, students on the wait-list will receive notice of space availability 3 hours before class starts, if in-person spots are available.

On the event management side of things, you’ll know when people are on the wait-list, when you see the blue clip-board icon. Click/tap on that to expose the list of students on the wait-list.

Available now for everyone

We’re thrilled that we’ve been able to ship yet another big update to our registration system to help our customers adapt to the ongoing pandemic. With hybrid events containing in-person, virtual and on-demand offerings now becoming the new normal, we’re thrilled to now also offer our customers a way to give their students an option to join a wait-list for the precious in-person spots.

This new feature is now live in production and available to be used by all customers on all plans. Thanks so much to our customers who gave us such valuable insights while building this feature, we hope you’re as happy with it as we are!

Tula Software officially sunsets support for all native iOS applications

We are happy to announce that effective today Tula Software will no longer make any applications available for download via Apple’s App Store. This includes the Tula Software application as well as any client ‘white-label’ applications. Note: All customers still on the white-label plans will have their Tula Software subscriptions updated accordingly.

At the end of last year we wrote about Apple’s decision to tax brick and mortar businesses bringing their businesses online, and how Tula Software customers were able to avoid paying this unnecessary 15% of their revenue fee to Apple. As well, we wrote about how Apple and Google’s app store policies are outdated, and that they end up requiring studios to break up their passes into on-line vs. in person, else risk Apple taking a 15% cut of even your in-person attendances.

Now that we have rolled out the ability for our customers to host in-person and on-line hybrid events, along with the corresponding ability for students to choose their preferred method of attending, now is the right time to do this.

To be abundantly clear: If we were to provide the functionality we just released on the native iOS applications, you would be required to pay 15% of your revenue to Apple.

We find the idea of Apple receiving 15% of your revenue to be absurd, and it is not something we will support or participate in.

Fortunately, none of our customers need Apple to sell their classes, and none of their students need apple to register for and attend their classes, thanks to the ongoing magical powers of the open web.

As you know by now, Tula customers are able to host our website integration widgets on your own domain and every studio comes with a mobile app site (formerly called student urls) that mimics all the functionality of the apps, but in the browser, which also lives on your own domain.

We have a ton of exciting plans for the future on both the student side and admin side of things as we focus all of our development efforts on the browser this point forward.

To all of our customers who have written such kind emails to us over the past few weeks about our updates, we can’t tell you enough how much we appreciate you!